


fundamentals

by trap



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:00:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trap/pseuds/trap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parker loves utile things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fundamentals

 

 

Parker loves utile things. You could almost say she fetishizes them: the harness that allows her flight, the lock that keeps her out, the safe she needs to crack - money, always, money, that base component of transaction, the only thing she can depend on to always get her what she needs.

She loves security systems the most. Not just because she enjoys the thought puzzle of breaking into them, but because - properly crafted - security is a work of art. It's three dimensional consideration, tricksy and numeric, thinking in angles and precisely timed intervals of shift and change. Studying a top-notch security system isn't quite a religious experience, but it comes close, for Parker: she experiences a moment of rapture.

Of the others, Eliot understands her love of the useful most. He is also hands-on: knives, fists, even (rarely, horribly) guns. His gardening is a natural outgrowth of his cookery, and his moments of most complete calm come not when he sautés this or punches that, but when he tills dirt with his palms cupped like shovels, when he leans close to green things growing and inhales.

This type of life is a smell - is sunlight. Is newness, the budding leaf slowly unfurled.

Sophie and Nate are flip sides of a coin, or once were, when Nate was an honest man and Sophie an unrepentant thief.

Where Parker and Eliot deal with and appreciate the physical, the useful, Sophie and Nate wage war across a battleground of greed. Sophie wants and wants and can't stop her wanting, while Nate safeguards and restores, always the same objects, the same items, the art.

They both love a good con. Sophie loves twisting old classics, outsmarting and outacting everyone around her, loves the thrill of a success, the near-miss adrenaline rush, the sensation of bending and pushing and pulling others to her will. Nate loves untangling the webs she leaves, grasping at the threads of her plots and following them down, to her.

Nate loves the chase, but more, the capture.

What Nate and Sophie deal in is simple. Human wants, human desires, just plain humans.

Hardison is different. Maybe it's because he is younger than the others, and his generation gave popular rise to the idea of freeware and peer-to-peer downloading, the notion that everything could (and should) be free, that information was not a privilege but a right -

maybe it's simply that he lives behind a computer screen and deals in the abstract, the one-step-removed-from-concrete that is byte, particle, and wave; maybe it is just that his brain is hardwired for idea and not object, the substance but not the form – but when Hardison looks at the world, he doesn't think of what he can use from it, or what he can hoard. He doesn't think in closed doors or closed fists: but open, everything, wide open, and shared.


End file.
